Comment by PaulHoule

10 months ago

I recently got an M4 Mac Mini which is an amazing piece of hardware. (When it came in the mail I couldn't believe it could fit in the small box it was in!)

My wife was angry about the large volume of advertising, both on web sites and on the desktop, on the machine out of the box. Part of it was needing an adblocker, which meant switching to Firefox, because installing an adblocker on Safari requires an Apple account which my wife doesn't have and wouldn't want to make.

I was amused that, by default, I got numerous nags in the form of 1999 retreads of the confirm dialog from the 1984 original mac. I'd contrast that to Microsoft's nags which look like a modern HTML-inspired interface [1].

Apple's model of "local account but you get nagged into attaching an Apple account so you can use the store and other services" is inferior, in my mind, to Microsoft's model where you can use use your Microsoft account to log into the desktop and your XBOX and all the services that Microsoft has to offer. I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.

[1] I won't apologize for thinking that's an advance, particularly since HTML/CSS has been adding things like Flexbox and Grid which are exactly what the doctor ordered for application development.

15 comments

PaulHoule

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ohgr  10 months ago

You don't need an Apple account to install an adblocker. You just install it from here https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html

And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.

  • lostlogin  10 months ago

    Do you need a blocker if you run PiHole?

    It seems to do the job for the house very nicely.

    • qwerpy  10 months ago

      Yes you still do. Sophisticated companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, many others) will serve ads from the same domains that serve the content you actually want. Pihole can't block the ads without blocking everything. Ad blockers are necessary to block specific pieces of content from amazon.com, youtube.com, etc., while still letting you use the service. It's a constant cat and mouse game, but ublock origin does a good job of staying updated.

    • ohgr  10 months ago

      Probably not. I don't own one as I'm lazy. I actually paid for AdGuard and use it on my iPhone and iPad. It comes with a mini PiHole implementation built in.

      2 replies →

legitster  10 months ago

> I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.

Same. I get that people don't like having to "buy" into an ecosystem. But credit where it's due - Microsoft eliminated dozens of different logins over the last decade. If you jump between multiple machines all the time, it's legitimately a decent experience. You can even be simultaneously logged into your personal and work OneDrives at the same time under the same user and everything just pretty much works.

  • seec  10 months ago

    Microsoft takes its time and has a lot of inconsistencies but eventually gets to some sort of desirable convergence state.

    They are a lot less idealistic and have an approach of working on it slowly but surely in the open. Apple on the other hand tries to maintain an unrealistic image of perfection and thus is always playing some sort of binary game, which is why things get stuck and never evolve beyond a certain point.

    I use to like Apple approach to things; with age I understand that Microsoft approach actually makes a lot more sense, especially if you need to maintain things over time.

    We should be glad that Microsoft "won" the desktop PC war because if Apple software had been used for critical software we would be in a lot of trouble as a society; I'm joking but barely...

drcongo  10 months ago

You can log into your Mac and your AppleTV and your iPhone and your iPad and all the services Apple has to offer with your Apple account. How is Microsoft offering the same thing any better?

  • int_19h  10 months ago

    You can't log into your Mac with your Apple account; you still need a local account created first, and it has its own login and password separate from the Apple ID associated with it (if any).